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Ubuntu Tries To Attract New Developers

11-03-2012, 10:10 AM

Phoronix: Ubuntu Tries To Attract New Developers

Through improving the publicly available Ubuntu Linux documentation and reaching out to new developers -- along with existing Windows developers that may now be thinking of targeting Ubuntu as their next supported platform -- the Linux OS hopes to increase its developer and application count...

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Is it just me or is ubuntu seems to be trying hard to go forward without having much substance underneath it.

Yeah, it's called vaporware or bafflegab like cloud computing, social media, next-gen solutions and other PR garbage that no one remembers 2 days after the presentation. I'd like Canonical to allocate 2-3 full-time devs to nouveau and other 2-3 devs to AMD's graphics team, but Canonical would rather spend 10 hours working around bugs or filing them rather than doing 2 hours of real hard work like Red Hat and Suse.

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Is it just me or is ubuntu seems to be trying hard to go forward without having much substance underneath it.

The problem is you can't excape from the Linux mess, no hard you try. The only way is to build something on top of it keeping "linux" under the hood, exactly like Android does or any other consumer project with linux at the "bottom".

Linux, intended as typical distribution we all know today, will never become "succesful" in the desktop market for obvious reasons. You first have to create a unique and undestroyable ecosystem, so this is the exact contrary of what Linux is (and this is Linux's strengh, evolution and not intelligent design).

This is why Linux will always be the best project in the world, but not the best in terms of consumer market share.

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"Ubuntu Desires Lower Audio Latency For Gaming"
And yet they use PulseAudio.

I could have sworn PulseAudio had application-customizable latency, expressly for the purpose of power saving when you don't need low latency, and getting good performance when you do need it. After all, waking up every 2 or 6 ms for music playback is foolhardy if you can buffer up several seconds of audio at a time from disk (or even the network if you use Icecast since it provides several seconds of buffering). The point is, it's flexible. I've played native Linux games (Trine, Steel Storm, Savage 2, HoN) with fantastic audio latency on top of PulseAudio.

Besides, now that PA is the de facto and some programs exclusively support it and 99% of programs at least mostly support it as an alternative, what alternative would you change to that still maintains compatibility with all apps that use PA as the default or the only option? I guess if you're one of the 10 people who has a hardware mixer you could do direct ALSA, and ignore the fact that for every person who has a hardware mixer there are 999,999 people who don't, and just not support audio for those people at all since PulseAudio is all bad and stuff (according to you).

I agree with the rest of your points about Ubuntu, but at this point it is ridiculous to think that PulseAudio is not the solution to Linux audio and can't be improved further to resolve situations where latency is unacceptable. The existing alternatives are not real alternatives due to some combination of: the lack of universal adoption, the lack of proper power management, the lack of user-friendly GUI tools, or the lack of various features that PA supports (bluetooth, flat volumes, network transparency, changing speaker configuration / number of channels, changing output device of running stream, etc.) If the only gripes against PA are that the latency is too high (on some hardware? definitely not mine) and it adds an unnecessary layer to hardware mixing, it's doing quite well -- considering the very grave problems presented by every other solution, including any totally new solution, which would just cause a re-hashing of all the upheaval and arguments that occur every time a new audio solution is presented for Linux. It's time to stop running and start sticking to our guns. PulseAudio has plenty of bullets left.

Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR?14.4B, GBP?12.11B), making each package?s upstream source code worth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost).http://pc-freak.net/blog/what-is-the...ware-projects/

my comment: Debian is the biggest distro out there but they don't get much credit as long as people know only its derivatives like ubuntu and mint. Is this bad, prolly because if they ask for funds(sources like E.U. or U.S.) they might get a reply "you know, you are not that famous, we will give you less than last year". if the host dies then the leech will go find blood from someone else.

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"Ubuntu Desires Lower Audio Latency For Gaming"
And yet they use PulseAudio.

"Ubuntu Needs To Improve OpenGL Drivers For Gaming"
And yet they use Unity.

"Ubuntu Tries To Attract New Developers"
And yet they don't contribute upstream.

"Ubuntu Developers Realize Need For Non-3D Desktop"
And yet they use Unity. Do they even know that there are fully developed desktops already existing out there?

I woud bet that in some years Ubuntu is no longer a Linux Distrubtion like Debian or Arch. I bet that it will be still based on Linux but imcompatible to rest of the GNU/Linux world (imcompatible from ubuntu to other distrubtions and not from upstream Linux to Ubuntu), like OS X and *BSD. Ubuntu is a curse and a blessing: in one side its a blessing cause it brings more people to Linux and gets more companys to develop software for liux, in other side its a curse cause it does compared to other distrubtions with simlar size less and cause it develops without the community of the oher projects: it dosn't uses the strengh that the community has.